Posts tagged “Maps”

My essay Comfort Zone was shortlisted for PRISM International‘s 2015 Creative Nonfiction Contest, and was printed in the Fall 2016 issue. PRISM Prose Editor Christopher Evans interviewed me about videogames, systems and stories, and books that have maps in them.

Plopped into a platform-strewn obstacle course, haunted forest, or asteroid field, I would ransack every nook and cranny as if looting a couch for lost coins. I was a relentless adventurer, and one of the thrills of the 8-bit games I grew up with was that it was possible to exhaustively plunder those worlds. Even years before the internet wound its way to my small town, I could be reasonably certain that I had picked every pocket of the little planets that fit inside those plastic cartridges. There were fictional cities I knew more intimately than my own neighbourhood.

The weird geographical synesthesia of seeing a U-Haul emblazoned with “Salt Lake City”, and with an Alberta license plate, in the middle of a small town in Newfoundland. As if the universe is attempting to triangulate the heart of the continent in its own inscrutable way.

Some sketches and notes I made a few years ago while working on Probable System, an experimental web game inspired by bpNichol’s “Probable Systems” series of poems. It’s a little adventure game, and the map is based on a computer keyboard. This was the first game I made using JavaScript.

Hiking near South Fork Trinity River this afternoon, and found this amazing piece of wood in a pile of debris washed up at a bend in the river. It’s about 5′ long and completely covered in intricate, overlapping bark beetle markings. Click the image above for a larger version.